Tag: Sheema Abdul Aziz

Project update 10: It’s a wrap! For now…

monsoon1
Drenched but happy that the fieldwork is finally over…for now

For those of you who are wondering what’s been going on in the Kenyir Wildlife Corridor (Primary Linkage 7), the end of the Chinese New Year period has also brought the end of Reuben‘s PhD field sampling. The tail end of the monsoon season caught Reuben and his team as they finally wrapped up their fieldwork, retrieving every last camera they set up along the Kuala Berang Highway. All the cameras set up in the Bintang Hijau Wildlife Corridor (Primary Linkage 8) have also been retrieved, but at a considerable cost – 15 camera traps were stolen over the course of 8 months! Only 2 were ever stolen from Kenyir within a similar sampling duration. Don’t worry, none of the stolen cameras were those adopted by individual donors. Continue reading →

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Publication update 11: All about tapirs

tapir

Reuben’s and Sheema’s latest publications are all about the Asian Tapir (Tapirus indicus). Compared to its New World counterparts, the only tapir species to be found in the Old World is relatively poorly studied. Despite its striking appearance, its distribution in Peninsular Malaysia is still largely based on guesswork rather than in-depth, long-term research. Scientists have also been unable to get an accurate idea of its population size.

These two papers published in Integrative Zoology aren’t part of Rimba’s work though; they’re the product of a research collaboration led by WWF-Malaysia that is the first attempt in the country to identify tapir individuals based on their specific black-and-white markings. Continue reading →

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Project update 8: Two Wildlife Corridor Projects!

Hi Rimba friends, the Kenyir Wildlife Corridor Project finally has a new update to share with you!

What have we been up to? Well for a start, we’ve found ourselves a new research station in the town of Gerik (Perak). Why do we need one there? This is because Reuben and Ahimsa are teaming up to start a new project in another wildlife corridor, near the town. Many thanks to Steven for getting the field house operational – it was quite difficult because the entire town of Gerik had no water supply for a week due to a landslide that took out a water treatment plant! But things are almost back to normal and the field station is 95% operational.

Our ‘other’ field house in Taman Gerik
Jet, the official field house cat and Rimba’s unofficial mascot
Jet is very possessive when it comes to our computer keyboards

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sheema has been helping the team catalogue more than 130,000 camera-trap photos from Kenyir into a software known as Camera Base. Although the cataloguing is far from over, we can tell you at least 32 mammal species have been camera-trapped so far – this is similar to the number of mammals recorded from camera-trap surveys in Malaysia’s largest protected area, Taman Negara. And this corridor is only 1% of Taman Negara’s size!

So is this the end of our work in Kenyir?  Continue reading →

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